Educational institutions are often required to meet standards set by an outside organization. For example, accredited pharmacy schools must meet the standards set by the Accreditation Council for Pharmacy Education (ACPE). Organizations like ACPE require new schools seeking accreditation to submit a new application for accreditation and previously-accredited schools to periodically go through a reaccreditation process. In both cases, the accrediting organization will generally require schools to demonstrate that their curriculum and/or that the material actually being covered in the classroom meets or exceeds the standards set by the accrediting organization.
Currently, the process for determining if an educational institution meets a set of standards is, for the most part, a manual process. The process is so cumbersome that some schools have dedicated staff members responsible for leading what can be a multi-year process. This process typically involves assessing how well a school has performed against the standard-setting body's curricular requirements. The latest practice for completing these assessments often includes conducting faculty and student interviews, gathering curricular materials including syllabi, presentations, assigned readings, assessments, reviewing these curricular materials (sometimes with the aid of technology like electronic search), and fact checking. This process is subject to significant human error. For example, faculty interviews can introduce significant error by, for example, omitting critical information or inadvertently misrepresenting what was actually taught in the classroom. Furthermore, the interviewers themselves may introduce error into the process because, for example, they lack sufficient time/resources to perform a comprehensive interview or gather data or they may inadvertently misinterpret the gathered data.
Because curriculum evaluation is based largely on subjective human interpretation of data, the process is not only subject to human error, it is also time-consuming and expensive. The process of setting up meetings with faculty, interviewing them and following up over the course of several years is a time-consuming process that translates into high labor costs and opportunity costs (taking time away from faculty members who could otherwise be conducting research, writing grant proposals, teaching, etc.).
There are a number of other shortfalls of the current process. The process for determining if a curriculum meets a set of standards is not easily audited. For example, in the case of the accreditation/reaccreditation process, an accrediting body's decision relies heavily on reports by the schools themselves. These reports may present the results of the school's analysis of data, but may not make the data itself readily available for audit. In addition, the data gathered for the analysis is often stored in multiple locations making it difficult to access and analyze.